Doncaster

VIC, 3108

Distance to

Home to one of the highest points in metropolitan Melbourne, and a shopping mecca

It’s fair to say Doncaster, 15 kilometres east of the city centre, is something of a late bloomer. Suburbia didn’t come here until the 1960s and 1970s in the guise of single-level brick and brick veneers on 700 square-metre blocks (give or take some), bricking over the fruit groves, planted on the area’s bucolic rolling hills a century before, mostly by German settler orchardists. Now the neighbourhood is in bloom again. Following the lead of other eastern mid-ring suburbs, it is experiencing a boom in high and medium density accommodation. New luxury family homes and townhouse developments are re-landscaping streets. But, it’s the high-rise developments – particularly clustered around Doncaster Hill, one of the highest points in metropolitan Melbourne, and shopping mecca Westfield Doncaster – that plan to transform the suburban into the urban over the next 15 years.

Changing, too, is the resident population with a new Asian and Middle-Eastern demographic adding to the original European migrant population, drawn here by its amenities, parks (the last vestige of its rural past) and elevation, affording some houses rather spectacular city views.